To Tell the Truth

THE title of C. K. Williams's new collection, his ninth, represents a devastating and entirely typical act of misdirection. ''The Singing'': it sounds so lyrical, so affirmative, so valedictory even, a celebration of poetic utterance that's just what you might expect from a poet old enough to collect Social Security, with one of those de facto lifetime-achievement Pulitzers under his belt, for ''Repair,'' his previous volume (this one won the National Book Award last year). Turn to the title poem, though, and you discover that Williams has a very different kind of singing in mind. The 20-line narrative tells how the poet, walking home one day, encountered a young black man who was ''singing no it was more of a cadenced shouting,'' improvising indecipherable words (he was ''black speaking black''), and who, when the poet tried to smile at him, changed the lyrics to ''I'm not I'm not a nice person'' -- not as a threat, but to make sure the poet knew ''that if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord between us I should forget it.'' A song, then, that is no song, communication denied, and yet, the poet thinks, ''both of us knew just where we were / In the duet we composed . . . the conventions to which we were condemned.'' So the two manage to sing a song after all, a ''duet'' made out of the ineradicable racial misunderstanding from which no ''singing,'' not the young man's, not the old poet's, is ever likely to set us free.

Williams's scorching honesty has always been his calling card. His poetry proceeds not from a verbal impulse, not from a lyrical impulse, not even from a prophetic or visionary impulse, but from a moral impulse. Everything, in his work, is held up to the most exacting ethical scrutiny, beginning with the poet himself. Implicitly, and often explicitly, this scrutiny extends to very act of writing poems in the first place. And so while other poets sometimes make a show of questioning the value of poetry, Williams really means it. The title poem of ''The Singing'' reminds us of another, from ''Repair,'' called, with equally cunning intent, ''The Poet'' -- our representative bard turning out to be a disheveled down-and-outer (''Bobby from nowhere, Bobby know-nothing'') whose writerly pretensions force Williams to question his own. In ''The Tract,'' the final poem in ''The Singing,'' the questions turn to outright indictments: ''absurd writing a word / striking it out while all around you as the books of truth say is suffering and suffering.'' To try to soothe such doubts with tired bromides about the redemptive value of art, blah, blah, blah, is to lull ourselves with the easy answers Williams has always refused. From the beginning, his work has been fueled by a rage against injustice that carries the implicit sense that the only thing that can make poetry less than criminal in a criminal world -- of white and black, rich and poor, victor and victim and, in the last long section of ''The Singing,'' of 9/11 and its aftermath -- is for it to shout and shriek and spit out the truth, for the poet, as he puts it here, to vomit ''the taste of the sulfur of my lowest / intestine on my tongue.''

Needless to say, Williams does not let his readers off any easier. At a time when a lot of people think that getting angry at their television is an adequate form of political engagement, Williams aims straight for the liberal piety that confuses consciousness with action: ''how rich,'' he has written, ''is the lexicon of our self-absolving; / how enduring our bland, fatal assurance that reflection is righteousness being accomplished.'' His poetry is a constant vigilance over what the mind does to moral experience -- its alibis, its evasions, all its ingenious contrivances for keeping the ego safely separated from the truth.

The danger of this kind of poetry, paradoxically, is solipsism. There's long been a strain within Williams's work that falls into this trap, and it's represented here by ''Of Childhood the Dark,'' a long sequence that makes the first years of life sound like a solitary grope through a world inhabited by a gang of creepy abstractions. (Williams's diction gets pretty creepy here, too, with words like ''englobed'' and ''fauceted.'') To be fair, though, Williams is fully aware of this danger. Many of his most vivid poems are precisely those in which he calls himself to a more mindful engagement with the world, and in particular with other people. Indeed, in poems like ''Lessons'' or ''Oh,'' where chance events make him remember, respectively, his first piano teacher and his old friend Harold Brodkey, he contemplates the notion that given the role of memory in mental life, a large ''portion of self'' is effectively constituted by others.

To live rightly, then -- observantly, compassionately -- is to ''take the world / to us,'' into us. Some of the best poems here are responses to immediate experience, encounters vitalized by the quality of attention the poet brings to them, whether the encountered other is a deer, a work of art or a skeleton in a natural history museum. But the most striking expression of Williams's desire for immediacy tells the story of a schoolgirl who suddenly one day, in the midst of friends, lets herself fall from a fourth-floor window. After ''so much plotting and planning,'' Williams believes, the girl was reaching for meaning and substance -- for the ''grace'' that comes from ''being in the world spontaneously.'' ''This Happened,'' the poem is called, and the title bespeaks the poet's hunger for reality, for what the girl herself desired to feel -- that is, for weight.

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Some of the encounters Williams reports on, though, seem forced, as if, like a tourist always searching for the next picture, he's spent a little too long scanning the world for things to write poems about. If that's a sign of age, another may be the mellow, celebratory note that, despite Williams's fierce temperament, has crept into his verse. This is not his strong suit; writing about his family or close friends, as he does in a handful of poems here, he can sound sentimental, even flatulent, producing phrases like ''the miracle of others'' or ''this music / we hear, this other, / richer still, we are,'' which make me feel like I'm being addressed by one of those Conservative rabbis who fancies himself spiritual.

Williams is also parsimonious with verbal effects, as if in principled withdrawal from beauty as an artistic aim. His poetry is indeed often less a singing than ''a cadenced shouting,'' apt to achieve its effects through irony and voice (he can drop into a conversational tone that's a marvel of sly fluidity) rather than highly colored or figurative language. ''Reality has put itself so solidly before me,'' he writes here, ''there's little need for mystery,'' but a little mystery, a little magic, is just what I most miss in him. There is, indeed, a minor mood in Williams's work, most often kindled by thoughts of fellow artists, in which he's willing to unbrace his evangelical rigor and embrace beauty and its solaces:

our consolations,

if there are such things,

dwell in our conviction

that always somewhere

painters will concoct

their colors, poets sing,

and a single oboe

dutifully repeat

its lesson, then repeat

it again, serenely

mounting and descending

the stairway it itself

unfurls before itself.

The beauty here is visual as well as sonic, the poem becoming the staircase it describes, and with its repeated repetitions traversing and retraversing, like the oboe, its self-created space. And yet that second, quietly jarring line is perhaps the passage's greatest, and certainly its most characteristic, felicity.

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A version of this review appears in print on February 15, 2004, on Page 7007016 of the National edition with the headline: To Tell the Truth. Today's Paper|Subscribe